Oops. Did President Barack Obama acknowledge that the extraordinary propaganda
campaign to blame Russia for helping Donald Trump become president has a very
big hole in it, i.e., that the US intelligence community has no idea how the
Democratic emails reached WikiLeaks? For weeks, eloquent obfuscation – expressed
with “high confidence” – has been the name of the game, but inadvertent admissions
now are dispelling some of the clouds.

Does the Russian government hack, as many other governments do? Of course.
Did it hack the emails of the Democratic National Committee? Almost certainly,
though it was likely not alone in doing so. In the Internet age, hacking is
the bread and butter of intelligence agencies. If Russian intelligence did not
do so, this would constitute gross misfeasance, especially since the DNC was
such easy pickings and the possibility of gaining important insights into the
US government was so high. But that is not the question.

It was WikiLeaks that published the very damaging information, for example,
on the DNC’s dirty tricks that marginalized Sen. Bernie Sanders and ensured
that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination.
What remains to be demonstrated is that it was “the Russians” who gave those
emails to WikiLeaks. And that is what the US intelligence community doesn’t
know.

At President Obama’s Jan. 18 press conference, he admitted as much: “the
conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking
were not conclusive as to whether WikiLeaks was witting or not in being the
conduit through which we heard about the DNC e-mails that were leaked.”
[Emphasis added}

It is necessary to carefully parse Obama’s words since he prides himself in
his oratorical constructs. He offered a similarly designed comment at a Dec.
16, 2016 press conference when he said: “based on uniform intelligence assessments,
the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC. … the information was
in the hands of WikiLeaks.”

Note the disconnect between the confidence about hacking and the stark declarative
sentence about the information ending up at WikiLeaks. Obama does not bridge
the gap because to do so would represent a bald-faced lie, which some honest
intelligence officer might call him on. So, he simply presents the two sides
of the chasm – implies a connection – but leaves it to the listener to make
the leap.

WikiLeaks Account

As I suggested
to RT viewers right after the last press conference, the reason WikiLeaks might
have been “not witting” could be that it was quite sure it was not a “conduit”
for “hacking” by the Russians or anyone else. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange
has stated that the Russian government was not the source and it’s significant
that President Obama stopped short of contradicting him. It is also clear that
WikiLeaks, in the past, has obtained LEAKED information from US whistleblowers,
such as Chelsea Manning.

Former U.K. Ambassador Craig Murray, a close associate of Assange, has made
clear that the two separate batches of Democratic emails – one from the DNC
and the other from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta – also were leaks
from insiders, not hacks from outsiders.

After the Jan. 18 press conference — what Murray called the “Stunning
Admission from Obama on WikiLeaks” — Murray wrote:

“In his final press conference, beginning around 8 minutes 30 seconds in, Obama
admits that they have no evidence of how WikiLeaks got the DNC material. This
undermines the stream of completely evidence-free nonsense that has been emerging
from the US intelligence services this last two months, in which a series of
suppositions have been strung together to make unfounded assertions that have
been repeated again and again in the mainstream media.

“Most crucially of all Obama refers to ‘The DNC emails that were leaked.’ Note
‘leaked’ and not ‘hacked.’ I have been repeating that this was a leak, not a
hack, until I am blue in the face. William Binney, former Technical Director
of the NSA, has asserted that were it a hack the NSA would be able to give the
precise details down to the second it occurred, and it is plain from the reports
released they have no such information. Yet the media has persisted with this
nonsense ‘Russian hacking’ story.”

So I suppose we should thank Barack Obama for dispelling at least some of the
obfuscation at which he is so rhetorically eloquent, while our lame “mainstream”
media take steno and regurgitate ad nauseam.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an Army Infantry/Intelligence
officer and CIA analyst for a total of 30 years and now servers on the Steering
Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Author: Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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